The first Dune book by Frank Herbert came out in 1965 and changed sci-fi forever, but it was only recently that the book series finally got a decent movie adaptation thanks to director Denis Villeneuve. The first two Dune movies were both really good and really popular. With a third movie on the way, fans are no doubt jonesing for something to help tide them over. If you want a sci-fi movie as dense, deep, and delightful as Dune to watch while you wait, you have lots of options.
2001: A Space Odyssey
I’m afraid I can’t not recommend you watch this movie, Dave
We have to start with a classic. There are few films more obsessed over than this 1968 gem from Stanley Kubrick, which is about…well, 2001 is the kind of movie that makes it hard to finish that sentence. We start at the dawn of man, like you do, before jumping several thousand years into the future and picking up with a set of astronauts aboard a spacecraft. The artificial intelligence that runs the spacecraft, HAL 9000, gets a little antsy and becomes a danger to the human crew members.
But outlining the plot doesn’t do justice to the movie. What to make of the strange alien monolith that seems to supercharge man’s evolution? How do we interpret the ending with the mysterious star child? How impressive is it that HAL 9000 has endured as an iconic movie villain for nearly 60 years and only seems more relevant now, thanks to the advent of generative AI? What other clues about the future does this movie hold? People have obsessed over questions like that for decades, and if you haven’t joined them, you’re missing out.
Release Date
April 10, 1968
Keir Dullea
Dr. David Bowman
Gary Lockwood
Dr. Frank Poole
William Sylvester
Dr. Heywood Floyd
Douglas Rain
HAL 9000 (voice)
Interstellar
Reason number 472 Christopher Nolan is one of the best directors alive
There are echoes of 2001: A Space Odyssey in a great many sci-fi movies that followed, even decades later, in 2014’s Interstellar. The movie is nominally about a time in the near-ish future when Earth is plagued by famine, so astronauts head through a wormhole in a last-ditch effort to find a new home for mankind. But like 2001 (and like Dune), there’s more going on underneath the surface.
That simple framework ends up being an excuse for director Christopher Nolan to explore the nature of time, as it dilates around the characters as they travel the cosmos. There’s also a deeply personal story about family woven into this tale. Like a lot of the best sci-fi films, the movie doesn’t provide us with all the answers, but that just gives fans more reason to return again and again.
Release Date
November 7, 2014
Runtime
169 Minutes
Director
Christopher Nolan
Writers
Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan
Solaris
Solaris was released in 1972, but you can watch the 2002 remake if you want to see George Clooney in the lead role
Okay, we have one more film inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, and then I swear we’ll move on. It’s not my fault, 2001 inspired some of the deepest, densest sci-fi of the last half-century.
In this case, the connection is pretty funny; Solaris director Andrei Tarkovsky saw 2001 and thought it was a pretentious piece of phony drivel, so he set out to make a sci-fi movie with real emotional depth. The result was Solaris, which follows a psychologist sent out to a space station orbiting a distant planet. When he gets there, he finds that things aren’t quite right; there are people on the space station who weren’t part of the original crew, and it’s discovered that the planet itself—called Solaris—may be able to resurrect lost loved ones…or maybe they’re only projections, you’ll have to watch to find out the rest.
Solaris is a slow, methodical movie that deserves to be watched in a dark room with zero distractions. If you’re open to it, you’ll come out the other end with a lot to think about.
Release Date
September 26, 1972
Runtime
167 Minutes
Director
Andrei Tarkovsky
Writers
Stanislaw Lem, Fridrikh Gorenshteyn, Andrei Tarkovsky
Blade Runner
The Dune crossover you weren’t expecting
Not all sci-fi movies have to be set in space. This 1982 Ridley Scott masterpiece stars Harrison Ford as a “blade runner,” someone who hunts down and “retires” wayward replicants, which are artificial human beings all but indistinguishable from the real thing. (Don’t you love how all these old sci-fi concepts are gaining relevance again now that people have AI girlfriends and companies are talking about giving us our own robot companions?) Ford’s character, Rick Deckard, follows his mission deep down the rabbit hole and learns some unexpected truths about replicants, the powerful corporate interests that control this world, and maybe even himself.
Blade Runner is rightly considered a classic, and Denis Villeneuve himself followed it up in 2017 with Blade Runner 2049, which is every bit as good. Watching Blade Runner 2049, you can feel Villeneuve psyching himself up to direct the Dune movies, playing in someone else’s cinematic sandbox before adapting Frank Herbert’s classic book in an all-new way. If you wanted to marathon the Blade Runner movies and Villeneuve’s Dune movies, they would all feel like they go together.
The Fountain
Sci-fi movies don’t come much deeper, denser, and weirder than this
I promised you deep, dense, and weird; I didn’t promise you good. That said, The Fountain has found a passionate cult following since it bombed at the box office in 2006, and I can’t help but have respect for any movie that goes this hard, wisely or not.
The Fountain stars Hugh Jackman in a triple role: he’s a conquistador in the 16th century looking for the Tree of Life, a scientist in the 21st century trying to save his wife (Rachel Weisz) from death by cancer, and an interstellar traveler in the 26th century. The movie cuts back and forth between these timelines, linking the disparate storylines by theme and visual motif. Director Darren Aronofsky is asking the big questions here: can we achieve immortality? What is the meaning of death, and therefore, of life? I’m not sure if he finds the answers, but I don’t regret watching him try.
Release Date
November 22, 2006
Runtime
97 minutes
Director
Darren Aronofsky
Writers
Darren Aronofsky, Ari Handel
Lots of space, little opera
Dune is uncommonly thoughtful for a sci-fi epic, asking questions about consciousness and fate in between rides on sandworms and assaults on desert palaces. All of the movies on this list will get your brain humming, but I’ll admit that none of them feature a rip-roaring adventure tale the way Dune does. For something like that, you’re better off watching Star Wars, but then you wouldn’t be getting any of the contemplative bits. Whatever my fears about the future of the franchise, I love Star Wars, but I can still admit that it’s basically Dune for dummies.
When you get down to it, Dune is quite singular, a rare combination of brains and brawn. The third movie will be based on the book Dune Messiah, which is notably more cerebral than the first novel, so maybe it’ll be a little more like these movies. We’ll find out for sure when Dune: Part 3 opens in theaters on December 18, 2026.
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And if these films still aren’t enough to tide you over, there are plenty of dark, smart, mind-bending sci-fi TV shows to watch as well.
